Enhanced Safety Management and Risk Mitigation through Robust HFDM

Authors / Details: Eric Bechhoefer, Michael Augustin

Abstract
Helicopter Flight Data Monitoring (HFDM) can be a central and effective component of an operator's safety management strategy. By capturing and processing operational information from aircraft flight data, the operator/owner can identify safety hazards, facilitate monitoring and assessment of the interaction between the pilot and the aircraft, initiate remedial actions, and support continuous improvement of the safety management system. The Robust HFDM system described in this paper also provides improved results via automation of data download and reporting. Automation is achieved by formalizing the concept of a flight operation, adding exceedance reporting, and improving the HFDM architectural design to allow for the transfer of data to secure ground based storage. In the extreme, robust HFDM also provides protection of data in the event of a mishap event that would usually only be available via post incident analysis of a crash survivable memory. This paper discusses the formalized concept of a flight operation, how regime recognition has been tailored to support the more robust application, and finally the addition of exceedance monitoring. The changes in architecture, processing and data transfer, result in a new and more robust HFDM system.